All The New Thinking Is About Loss.

If We Want To Have A Two-class Society And An Unemployed, Welfare-crippled Lower Class That Has No Access To Equality And Educational Opportunity And No Access To Jobs And Is Resentful And Furiously Angry, We Can Have It - That's What We've Been Willing To Pay For So Far.

I Am Talking About Poetry. It's Like That Line From [john] Yeats: I Go Back To "where All The Ladders Start/ In The Foul Rag And Bone Shop Of The Heart."

When I Came Into The Job, Funding For The Humanities At The Federal Level Was Being Drastically Cut. This Was The High Tide Of The New Republican Congress.

Fiction Writers Have Their Own World, And Poets Have Their Own World, And Literary Criticism Has Sort Of Passed Over Into Cultural Studies In The University, And So On. They Seem More Disconnected From Each Other Than They Did When I First Began To Write.

Prose Gets Divided Up Into Fiction And Nonfiction And Short Fiction And Long Fiction And Autobiographical Nonfiction And So On. Poetry Can Do Any Of Those Things Except With The Added Definition Of Intensified Formal Pressure.